Starve a cold and feed a fever? Or is it feed a cold and starve a fever? That conundrum may be unresolved, but just make sure you don’t starve a cold of exercise. As tempting as it may be to curl up on the couch with a blanket and a cup of tea and nap away the day, evidence suggests the best approach may be to keep exercising your way to health.

We are talking about the common cold here, courtesy of the rhinovirus: stuffy nose, sore throat, and tired with occasional cough. If you have the flu – with fever, chest congestion, muscle aches and headaches – you probably need to sit this one out. But for regular colds, exercise might actually help you feel better.

Doctors who are exercise buffs themselves tend to promote some modest exercise when you have the common cold. The conventional wisdom is referred to as the “neck” rule – symptoms above the neck means you can exercise, while those below the neck suggest you should not.

When prompted by the question of what advice to give to athletes when they catch a cold, Leonard Kaminsky, an exercise physiologist from Ball State University, tested things out. He recruited young men and women of varying levels of fitness and intentionally infected them with the rhinovirus. Another group was not exposed and served as the controls.

After two days and at the peak of the cold symptoms, study subjects vigorously exercised on treadmills. The findings revealed that having a cold had no effect on either lung function or exercise capacity. Exercisers felt a little more fatigued than usual but functionally were fine.

Researchers also found that exercise did not slow down recovery time for cold sufferers. In fact, many said they actually felt better.